


endless, nameless

by full_moon_pills



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: (not terribly graphic), (though he doesn't see it as that), Blood and Violence, Episode: s03e01 The Empty Hearse, Gen, I was sad and I wrote this really late at night, It's sad guys, Pre-Episode: s03e01 The Empty Hearse, References to Depression, Self-Harm, Self-Harming Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes Has a Nightmare, Sherlock Holmes Misses John Watson, Sherlock Holmes has PTSD, Sherlock-centric, idk what else to tag, there's a Nirvana lyric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:29:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22115665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/full_moon_pills/pseuds/full_moon_pills
Summary: He finds himself a motel for the night, and it smells like piss and dust mites, but it has a room with a door he can lock and a bed, so he takes what he can get.Sets down his duffle and peels off his disguise - foreign clothes that have rubbed his skin the wrong way, left red patches blotchy and sensitive. Sherlock knows all the types of fabrics, polypropylene and viscose and nylon, and he knows quite well which ones he is adverse to, but he didn’t get to choose what clothes the man he shot in the head was wearing, and he required a disguise.>Sherlock s03e01 coda
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	endless, nameless

  
_but it’s okay to eat fish_

  
_‘cause they don’t have any feelings_

He finds himself a motel for the night, and it smells like piss and dust mites, but it has a room with a door he can lock and a bed, so he takes what he can get.

Sets down his duffle and peels off his disguise - foreign clothes that have rubbed his skin the wrong way, left red patches blotchy and sensitive. Sherlock knows all the types of fabrics, polypropylene and viscose and nylon, and he knows quite well which ones he is adverse to, but he didn’t get to choose what clothes the man he shot in the head was wearing, and he required a disguise.

He was a dead man walking. If it wasn’t Sherlock, it would have been someone else.

Someone else to strip him of his last dignity, to step around the bullet-sized hole in his head and leave him in that form - exposed, gaping like a fish above water, fingers still twitching in the oozing puddle of his own blood.

Sherlock closes his eyes, waits until the nausea abates.

He misses the way his Belstaff wraps around him, it’s heaviness. Without it, his skin is fluttery, weightless.

Then he takes a shower, and scrubs and scrubs and scrubs until there is blood oozing from the patches that used to be just irritated skin. Sherlock presses a palm to his hip, where the fabric dug in, and rubs harsh, circular movements, repetitive, over again, and the pain creates a rhythm that beats counter to his heart.

Just to keep himself in check. It’s the logical strategy, after all; he would do it if it wasn’t. But there’s only him in this dusty, bug-infested motel room, and only him to control himself. The pain grounds him. It’s a simple equation.

Sherlock glances down, turns around so that the feeble water spray can trail rivulets of red down his leg. Once it’s done, he towels off and shrugs into his own tattered clothes.

_You should patch that up. Don’t want it getting infected._

That’s John. Sherlock pays him no heed. If John truly where here, he wouldn’t tell Sherlock to take care of himself a little bit better, he would be covering the man Sherlock left to die in a Serbian parking lot.

_You know what will happen if it gets infected._

He does. He’ll have to leak the puss out of the wound with his bare hands, and then he’ll have to tend to it - if he doesn’t get weighed down with fever first, that is. It’ll put him out of commission for twenty four hours at least, and Sherlock can’t afford a day, because then the woman he needs dead won’t be dead by the time he needs her to be dead, and Sherlock might as well be a goner, because there are men on his tail this very second, and if Sherlock dies now he won’t be able to finish the job and John won’t be safe and Mrs. Hudson won’t be safe and Lestrade won’t be safe and John told Sherlock once he didn’t want a big funeral, but that if he were to die Sherlock would have to play his violin and and he _can’t_ \- 

“Shut up, John,” Sherlock says.

The empty motel room hums in response.

>

There’s a symmetrical sort of beauty to motels. Long hallways, stretched out in a way that no one knows which room they’d belong to if it weren’t for the numbers. The soulless abstract art. Nothing in the dresser. It rings in hollow silence, sound waves reverberating through empty walls.

There’s a stranger screaming next door.

Sherlock wakes, and he is scared scared scared, but his body doesn’t know. It gets up, walks across the stained carpet barefooted, and neither of them feel its burn across the soles of its feet. It opens the door to the bathroom, doesn’t close it, places it’s hand on either side of the sink. Stares into the mirror. It opens its - his body’s, his - mouth.

“It’s never the fall,” they say together, and the voices echo in its eardrums, and its mouth is still outstretched, waiting.

“It’s the _landing_.”

>

Sherlock wakes and he is _sad_.

His internal clock estimates it’s about four in the morning, much too early for him to be awake and melancholy. If anything, a nightmare would be expected - bouts of sleeplessness are prone to come earlier in the night, if at all these days. After months of him itching from exhaustion, writhing in his own body, scratching his brain raw from the inside, it’s as if his body has suddenly decided to turn his brain on it’s axis and refused any sort of comfortable measures once he’s able to provide them.

It’s irritating, mostly because he knows that sleep won’t fix this type of tired.

The radiator is making a ticking noise in the back of the motel room, _clack-clack, hiss_. He grinds his teeth, twists to press the side of his face tighter into the pillows.

He despises noise.

The cloth against his face is scratchy, and his sheets have winded their way around his body, tight and cold-damp with sweat. Sherlock thrashes his legs to the side in a blind moment of panic, something inside his chest swelling and constricting in sudden fear, and then he thinks of a man’s fingers twitching like flippers, like his own legs, and leans off of the bed to retch.

Sherlock hangs there, finger fixed into the mattress, chin dangling off the side in a way that cuts off his oxygen, crumples his throat.

He’s not in a piss-smelling, dusty motel with a radiator that goes _clack-clack, hiss_. He’s in Baker Street, and John is sitting in his chair, and he’s got a triple homicide that he’s solving, not committing, and he’s safe, and they’re all safe, and the sheets are soft.

He doesn’t have time for sad.

Sherlock gets up to rummage in his duffle for antiseptic bandages that will cover the open skin on his hip.

**Author's Note:**

> that's all, it's a short thing, but I hope people enjoyed it. I wanted to explore a bit of Sherlock's headspace during his time away.
> 
> the quote at the beginning comes from Nirvana's Something In The Way, and the title of this piece from the hidden track on their album Nevermind: Endless, Nameless.
> 
> comments are much appreciated :)


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